50 BILLION MESSAGES PER DAY WITH 32 ENGINEERS | Prime Reacts 

truly terrifying

nice way to put it

yet shit happens and things doesn't work so it's accurate lol

no but maybe

At least with Erlang the edge cases won't take down the whole system... Erlangs paradigm was always 'Let it crash', in fact the whole language was designed with Fault tolerance in mind, they knew in critical systems like telecommunications the system needs to always remain up and available, so rather than attempt to defensively program, they viewed there will always be unforeseen bugs. hardware may fail, but they asked how can we ensure those problems never break the wider system. Every user action is isolated in its own PID, so when an edge case arises in that PID it just crashes, and a supervising process just restarts it.

They are running FreeBSD. Not Linux.

lmao

... with monochrome screens and Vi as editor...

😂😂😂

No, they found Erlang

he probably didn't know how to reverse a linked-list

lol @@mrlectus

BSD also allows running programs in the kernel memory space.

@@stevenhe3462so can Linux en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBPF

​@@stevenhe3462but shouldn't that also be a security issue?

@@ummijaan1448 not if you know what a computer is

@@qwoolrat sorry bro i thought I knew what a computer is but turns out I don't. Sorry for wasting your time.

the tao of programming is a masterpiece

...and one month if you put one good engineer on it.

So are you saying that I should start to use Erlang?

Basically Erlang FORBIDS mutable state (stored in RAM)

@@SeanPoulter Its amazing how easy is to create massively scalable things with Erlang, like most of the heavy lifting is really the programming paradigm. I was reading the Ejjaberd source code and I was impressed how little code in relation to the runtime is necessary to create the core of what is Whatsapp.

Try doing that with C you might save a lot of memory, but you lose all scaling as well. Its almost like C is cheating by being unsafe with its memory model full of aliasing and sharing via the use of pointers. You are also going to need 35.000 engineers because C is a shit programming language that requires a lot of stupid work to manage the memory. Its ironic that computer were invented to automate industrial process, yet, the very own engineers working with computers decided to not industrialize the most boring and stupid programming task : managing memory. All because in 1970, the PDP11 only have like 8Kb of RAM or something... But Erlang coming from the telephony world don't use memory to process data, only to control process that control the data flowing in actual wires, that's the magic. Its the control-plane/data-plane separation. Stored program with mutable shared memory and big linear address space was a mistake, and its not even how hardware works anymore anyways, the so called "C" programmers don't even program bare-metal anymore, its all a fad, its only there for their ego or something, that a modern compiler has to make a modern computer look like a 1970's era PDP11. And we are forever going to be stuck in this memory model thanks to C and Unix and Intel.

​@@sck3570if you want a more readable language you can use Elixir, which basically runs on Erlang.

I was thinking the same thing

Was about to write the same comment. Such a waste of time. Such a shallow and boring article I do not see how it deserved the youtube upload.

actually it didn't explain why and how WhatsApp could handle all that with just 30 engineers

Agreed. I learned nothing from this video. Glad I skipped 90% of it. Dev youtubers really should focus more on providing value with their article-based videos. Most of the time it's empty phrases like "if you've never worked on x problem....it's HARD! Like...actually hard" and other trivial statements. Feel like it's more about engaging the dev community by addressing obvious common concerns, struggles and frustrating experiences as a dev more than providing new insights

yeah, like, do they store the messages in a txt? how do they query that volume of data? that would be interesting to know

Exactly it was so generic, it was like someone had an assignment to write a 500 words essay

It's been a while but I'm pretty sure there are much more thorough articles on the topic of WhatsApp and their Erlang + FreeBSD setup.

Fear of telling too much and then having the information used against you later; fear of clones; industrial secret; or it just takes too much effort to ask the techs how shit is actually working.

That is true for good and smart engineers. The average engineer needs a manager to tell him what to do. :D

Just do a sponsored ad bro 😂

agreed

Yeah I want to use it as well. But tell that to my fam, my friends and co-workers lol

@@kevyyarjust hack them, add signal to their phone, and then tell them they wouldn’t have been hacked if they had used signal.

They lost me when they added Cryptocurrencies as In-app Payments

Akka is cool, if only wasn't running under JVM, and if I'm not wrong is just replicating what Erlang already does. Can't figure out why would they do that.

oh yeah I remember the suicide pacts -- 'links'.

And where are you working now? Or are you retiredd

@@daumienebi I work at Sinch

@@bacon-SG It's mainly funny to me because the Scala/Akka people often talk about Erlangs influence on them. But I agree, Akka is cool

You know what’s really funny about that? That’s how programming kind of started in the first place.

Yes, the irony of it all. The way things are now is way over complicated than it should be. @@airman122469

Maps as in applying functions to iterable objects? I learned that Go call key/val pairs for maps after i learned that - So i'm wondering what the actual norm of maps actually is

@@GOTHICforLIFE1 map as in the high order function. Like fold. Check wikipedia for "map (higher-order function)". It is a function / behavior. Not a data structure.

@@GOTHICforLIFE1 Both are map, same word used for different things. But I would say more people would use map for applying a function to every element of a collection and call an associative array a dictionary.

It's the features around concurrency and distributing work between multiple machines that makes Erlang so great. I absolutely hate the syntax though

​@@disguysnReally? I like its relative simplicity. It might be inspired by a rather unpopular and odd language (Prolog) I really never minded it. I certainly prefer it over a number of other functional languages... including OCaml. I think the pattern matching syntax is the nicest I've seen in any language.

I will follow this advice for my company, seems sensible and feasible,

where are they paying that kind of money in europe? lol

@@bos9824 According to the stats, £300k is around the median for a top-tier engineer in the US and £250k in the EU. If you want the best of the best, you'd have to pay a bit more than the median.

signal is the way

Telegram never was a wonderful messenger, it's spyware

Telegram was always apooky

I like Signal's simplicity, but I wouldn't replace Telegram for it by any means. It's still really useful for communities, way better than Discord.

RIP

hah, turns out the author DID mention FreeBSD :D should've watched the video completely before commenting :D

😂😂

yeah, i have heard many a good things about it. i also know we use it extensively on our own boxes at netflix

@@ThePrimeTimeagen Netflix does contribute to the source code of FreeBSD, they got even more performance out of the network stack ! Thanks for your reply, I’m honoured 😊

Yeah the network stack is blazing

Normally I have to pay for it. Thanks for letting me know about FreeBDSM

@@jayshartzer844

Some projects have such a large scope that you need a team for every stream. And thus, you get 20 teams and can't figure out who owns which feature

@@dejangegic I disagree. I’ve been to big and small firms. You don’t need that many devs. You need better leadership.

LFE

It looks like AI generated (no offense). Looked like those generic "best practises" articles... You could've made it more technical provided you had more information at hand.

There wasn't 32 people just for the client, aws didn't exist, and docker/kubernetes wasn't a thing

@@joaovmlsilva3509 I didn't assume there were 32 people just for the client, 32 engineers for the whole operation is a lot. And pretty sure they didn't require infrastructure to support 50 billion messages / day from launch day. Back in 2009 very few had smart phones world-wide. Now even people in starving 3rd world countries use smartphones and Whatsapp.

Why are you still paying for them?

​@@catto-from-heavenFortunately I am not paying for them. But there are not that many plans, that do not have SMS included. There is an option to make your own plan, but its base cost is higher, than my whole plan. So, we just look for what is closest to what we need. And even then, we still get some things, that we do not use, nor need, but are still forced to pay for. My plan, for example, has 250 minutes per 4 weeks, to call other providers' numbers. Even if I use 10-12 of them at most, I still pay for them, as there is just no better plan, that suits my needs. And there are plans, that have 400 and even 600 SMS, that cost 8-12 times of my plan. There's a lot of them actually. If you have good internet - it's 99% that you'll get a ton of useless SMS with it. I literally never even once heard of anyone, who would use SMS, even if their plan provides them (and it usually does). Though, I get 3-4 daily spam ads via SMS. So yeah, people do not use it. The ad companies do. But we are still paying for them.

But no one uses them

netflix has many applications that arent public facing thats why

I find Erlang syntax SO much better, is Elixir really he future? I have to make this choice.

is it faster than Erlang?

Instructions unclear accidentally learnt Go

@@sck3570 No. It compiles to BEAM byte code.

huehue brbr

Erlang code lives in Erlang processes (or "green processes") since they are isolated and cannot share state, unlike threads.